This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
A woman who says a now-retired federal judge sexually abused her in Utah 35 years ago filed a new lawsuit on Friday.
The amended lawsuit replaces one that Terry Mitchell filed earlier. At age 15, Mitchell witnessed serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin shoot and kill two black joggers, whom she considered friends, as they walked alongside Mitchell and another girl in Salt Lake City in August 1980. She was a witness in the 1981 federal trial against Franklin, and Richard Warren Roberts at the time was a federal prosecutor on the case, court documents state.
While the new suit uses much of the same language accusing Roberts of using manipulation, coercion and his position of trust to prey on the vulnerable teen against her will in his hotel room before, during and after the trial, it references a specific occasion when, during a break in the Franklin trial, Roberts allegedly took Mitchell into "a small room off the courtroom" and sexually abused her by kissing and fondling her by reaching under her clothes, the suit states.
The original suit also specified that Mitchell "repressed all memory of the ... abuse by Defendant Roberts" until after Franklin was executed in November of 2013, but the suit filed Friday instead states that after years of no communication, Roberts sent two emails to Mitchell hours after Franklin's execution, which "caus[ed] her to focus on memories she had tried to keep out of her mind because they caused so much pain" among other "traumatizing" emotions.
In the court documents, Mitchell claimed Roberts told her if she told anyone about their sexual relationship, it would result in a mistrial and Franklin would go free. The suit also alleges that Mitchell was particularly vulnerable after having been harassed and ostracized because of Franklin's shooting and as someone who had been sexually abused as a child and brutally raped two months before the shooting.
Then-27-year-old Roberts used his knowledge of her history to "groom" Mitchell for sexual abuse, the document claims.
A months-long investigation by the Utah Attorney General's Office and a review by former U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell found that Roberts did have a sexual relationship with Mitchell during the course of the Franklin trial. But the office, Cassell and a third judge, Raymond Uno, determined that, based on the laws on the books in 1981, the office could charge Roberts only with a class B misdemeanor, punishable by six months in jail.
Under current law, Roberts' conduct, which he admitted to in a phone call Mitchell recorded in 2014, would warrant a felony charge, according to Cassell's 25-page summary of several hundred pages of evidence gathered during the course of the investigation. The report was released by the A.G.'s office March 16, subsequent to the filing of the lawsuit.
On the same day, Roberts filed retirement papers, and one of his attorneys released a statement, which claimed the relationship, although "a bad lapse in judgment," was consensual, "did not occur until after the trial and had no bearing on the outcome of the trial."
Roberts' lawyers have since argued the case should be tossed because the statute of limitations is up on the 1981 claims, but plaintiff lawyers have countered that a new Utah law has removed such limitations in civil child sex abuse cases.
The statement also claimed Roberts had always held "respect and admiration" for Mitchell and their contact since the Franklin trial had been "warm, caring and friendly, which makes these new, false allegations all the more puzzling and disappointing."
Twitter: @mnoblenews